except the hurd runs on mach... i read a bunch of the hurd documentation a couple of years ago, including the paper by the people who tried porting it to L4. i

except the hurd runs on mach... i read a bunch of the hurd documentation a couple of years ago, including the paper by the people who tried porting it to L4. i also tried installing the debian port on an old desktop but had some driver issues. i guess most people run it in a hypervisor. there are a lot of architectural advantages to putting all drivers in user space. the hurd isn't really totally comparable to plan 9 (because it runs on a microkernel) or minix (because it's thought of as being independent of the any partciular microkernel). but it seems like the community/political issues -- plus the amount of cruft that's bound to accumulate in a codebase that old -- has nearly slowed to project to a grinding halt, which is a kind of a shame.